The intent of this session was to explore building retrospective maps: maps that would take as a starting point a theme and identify potential activities that would be useful. The motivation was two-fold:

1. help facilitators structure more effective retrospectives by drawing on the learning and experience of others
2. help new facilitators experiment and avoid the dreaded 3 question retrospective

There was a mixed response to the concept of retrospective maps. On the one hand there, could be value in having a template of sorts to use in particular contexts. On the other hand, capturing and explaining the context is crucial and an analogy was drawn to pattern languages. There is a fear, or perhaps a worry, that a retrospective map could be taken as a shortcut rather than taking the time and effort to plan/design and effective retrospective. We do want facilitators to think about, plan and contextualize their retrospectives.

• George Dinwiddie
• Esther Derby
• Susan Hunter
• Oana Junci
• Simon Roberts
• Diana Larsen
• Josef Scherer
• Ainsley Nies
• Cyril Megard
• John Martin
• Dan Deep
• Declan Whelan (host)

• Brainstorm retrospective themes
• Break into two groups to identify activities that would allow a team to explore that theme. Activities were to be organized by the five steps from the Agile Retrospectives book:
  1. Set the Stage
  2. Gather Data
  3. Generate Insights
  4. Decide What to Do
  5. Close

We made up something called the “Quality Continuum.” The idea was that we were interested in finding out when quality issues were discovered/quality incidents occurred along a timeline, then we want to look forward and backward, so map out (if possible) when the issue was introduced (earlier than discovered) and when it was resolved (later than discovered). This might be interesting mapped to a regular timeline to see if external events are causing injection of low quality events or it might be interesting to see if lags between introduction and discovery and between discovery and resolution can be resolved. Also, recommend reviewing whether introduction can be prevented…